GUY METTAN—I didn’t pay much attention to it when I arrived, because of my fatigue, and the intense emotions provoked by all I was seeing. But when I woke up at 3 a.m., I was suddenly struck by the sound of the cannon. Every two or three minutes, a shot goes off, rattling the windows and lighting up the sky with an orange glow: It’s Russian artillery firing on Ukrainian positions a few kilometres from the town centre. The Ukrainians retaliate with missiles, drones, or HIMARS rockets, which trigger Russian counter-battery fire, at a rate of one or two an hour, I believe. The next morning, I was taught to distinguish one from the other. The HIMARS rockets are silent until the final explosion, the French SCALP and British Storm Shadow missiles make an airplane-like hum, as do the Russian anti-missile batteries, while the ordinary shells fall with a whistling sound.
CRIMINAL RULING CLASS
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ERIC ZUESSE—So: a person’s circumstances tend to determine which club that person belongs to. The Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee both are clubs, and they both pretend to represent their voters, but actually they do not and never have. They represent the mega-donors who fund it. The billionaires who fund the Republican Party put up candidates who pretend to represent the self-interest of their voters, whereas the billionaires who fund the Democratic Party put up candidates who pretend to represent the nation’s interest.
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CANTAROW / LOEWENSTEIN—The Antisemitism Awareness Act, which indeed weaponizes antisemitism against those protesting Israel’s savagery in Gaza and the cruelty of its overall occupation policies, is soon to be voted upon by the Senate. Its enactment would mark a giant step towards degrading the U.S. Constitution, in particular its protection of freedom of speech, assembly, and a free press. It also threatens the status of academia as a realm in which the free exchange of ideas can flourish.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—After bemoaning Israel’s lack of success at “PR” regarding its Gaza assault, Romney just came right out and said that this was “why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature” — with “us” meaning himself and his fellow lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
“How this narrative has evolved, yeah, it’s a great question,” Blinken responded, saying that at the beginning of his career in Washington everyone was getting their information from television and physical newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
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ERIC ZUESSE—A major proponent of imperialism has been the U.S. mega-billionaire George Soros, whose Open Society Foundations had 226 (out of the 751) “Reliable allies in the European Parliament (2014 – 2019)”. In March 2022, the EU Parliament issued a 75-page statement, “The role of values in the EU’s external policies”, allying itself with America’s Government, and opposing itself to “autocracies” such as Russia and China; so, reinforcing the bifurcation between, on the one hand, the U.S.-and-‘allied’ bloc, of ‘democracies’, and, on the other, Russia, China, and other ‘autocracies’. Soros also has virtually owned, ever since 2 June 1994, the CIA-created Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), but started, on 4 September 2023, divesting himself of it.